Firework inspired load balancing approach for wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), where power consumption is a huge concern, the improvement of the network's lifetime is an area of constant study and innovation. The battery units of the sensor nodes cannot be recharged or replaced. Therefore, the need for energy efficiency in WSNs is ever-present. This paper proposes a Firework inspired Clustering Algorithm (FCA) to generate well defined and load-balanced clusters with the sensor nodes and gateways. The gateway works as cluster head (CH) for each cluster. The algorithm considers each cluster as a firework where the CH is the center of the firework and each sensor node is a 'spark' emitted by the firework. The goal of the FCA is to maximize the lifetime of the sparks which in turn will maximize the lifetime of the network. Simulations of the proposed algorithm are performed and compared with a few existing algorithms. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms under different evaluation metrics such as average energy consumed by sensor nodes vs number of rounds, number of active sensors vs number of rounds, first gateway die and half of the gateways die.